What is etudistic about chopin's etude #6 Op. 10?

[allchopin]

i dont get what makes his #6 op.10 an etude at all- the music is not hard and it is slow throughout. even lacks hard runs- what makes this piece hard??

[chopiszte]

This etude does contain pedagocical value.  The main difficulty lies in striking the long notes in the top part so that they are sustained yet not forced.

To strike all the notes in time is not difficult, but Chopin realized that technique involved not only whether or not a note was played but how it was played.

[nearenough]

The bass is marked "sempre legatissimo" and "sempre legato" and no pedal is indicated, so there's your etude. I use a little pedal. But keeping the left hand figuration smooth and even is the trick.

[mikey6]

An etude does not have to be 'technically hard' - translate lots of fast notes our thirds etc.
There are 3 seperate lines to keep controlled, a cantabile melody on top - so there's voicing and fingering issues.

[rachfan]

I totally agree with nearenough.  The goal of this etude is to develop the technique of playing a cantabile line using "finger legato" and a very legato and quiet accompaniment with virtually no pedal.  (In my own recording here, I believe I used a bit of pedal in the coda, that was about it.)  Once this piece is played with pedal, it casts a haze over the music (due to the constant neighboring and passing tones in the LH figuration), and then you no longer have Chopin, but instead Debussy.

[mike_lang]

This is an étude in the same vein as the 48 études of Bach - it is one of hearing.  Of course, it is rather banal polyphony by comparison, but the fact remains that there is no tricky fingerwork here.  The challenge is to hear a poem innerly, and to render each voice with care so that no part of the texture sounds superfluous - everything must be in balance and everything must interact.  It is an étude not only in hearing polyphony, but controlling the sound.

And, as can be said of most of the 24 (with the exceptions, of course, of 10/3, 25/5, and 25/10), there is also the challenge of translating something beautiful from a repeating texture.